Leopold Bloom

Fictional Character

Leopold Bloom is the fictional star of the James Joyce novel Ulysses, first published in 1922. The book follows a single day in the life of Bloom, an advertising salesman, as he travels about the city of Dublin, Ireland. (The day is 16 June 1904, and June 16th is now whimsically celebrated as "Bloomsday" in many cities around the world.) Bloom's wanderings are parallelled with those of the Greek hero Ulysses in the ancient classic The Odyssey, written by Homer. Other characters in Ulysses include Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce's earlier book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and Bloom's wife Molly, who has become something of a literary celebrity in her own right.

Other literary wanderers include Don Quixote, Bellerophon and Gandalf.